


Fall From Grace

by Anarchyinplasma



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Short, Violent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-06 02:46:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21219290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anarchyinplasma/pseuds/Anarchyinplasma
Summary: "Gabriel Reyes was once a good man, a great man, even a hero to his country"





	Fall From Grace

**Author's Note:**

> Just written in waiting time for my atrocious DPS queues, just something that caught my imagination.

Gabriel Reyes was once a good man, a great man, even a hero to his country, a founding member of Overwatch; the leader of the strike team during the omnic crisis that shook the world to its core. It had been him and Morrison alone that pushed onwards to the final control core of the corrupt god-minds, knee-deep in shredded metal and coolant, grinding their way through the endless omnic soldiers until they hit a chamber filled to the brim with wafer-thin membranes of endless computer power stacked to the ceiling.

When they left that chamber, the crisis was over, the god-mind’s control over the omnium at large was shattered, and both men were heroes. A whirlwind of medal ceremonies, remembering the fallen soldiers of the original strike-team. Then Overwatch was kept on, Morrison turned into Strike Commander, given a statue. Reyes, he was passed over, put in charge of a black-ops kill team and shunted off to the side.

Shortly before the fall was when the psychotic episodes started.

O’Deorein’s experiments had turned him into something other, she would claim “post-human” and “beyond mortality”; Reyes called it a curse and that was that. He still didn’t understand the science, something to do with a lock on his metabolism… whatever, didn’t matter. It made him better at his job, but the extra resilience very much had its downsides. He could already walk off a bullet wound or five, the government’s SEP had seen to that, but his new enhancements slowly began to make him... unstable. A lack of self-control in the middle of a thick firefight, overuse of his extra power during a clandestine kill mission, that he could have tolerated, but it got far worse.

The mission to Venice, he pulled the trigger on Antonio in clear violation of the plan, started an international incident, his mental state started to degrade, he was quicker to snap, the rift between he and Morrison continued to grow, and grow, until the fall of Overwatch.

When Reyes finally, eventually, clawed his way out of the rubble, the damage was irreversible. His face was forever damaged; the pain was immense, and when he made his way back to Talon, they’d bolted a mask to his face and sent him out to shred everything that remained of Overwatch to pieces, burn the skeleton to the ground and salt the earth. Which had lead to his current situation, infiltrating a private para-military base where some of his former colleagues now worked.

It had taken him a day to enter this base solo, no help from Sombra on this one; but now he was in and the real meat of his mission could begin.

He started small, his energy reserves had been severely drained by the infiltration, he needed to feed. He killed the janitors first, left their emaciated bodies in the vents while he gorged himself on lifeforce. Three days later he started phase two of his plan. It was difficult even for him, for a normal man it would have been impossible. But Gabriel Reyes was no longer a man, he had christened himself the Reaper, and he made sure the name fit to a tee.

His first port of call was the CO’s office, he walked directly up to the room, killed both guards with a shower of pellets each, and opened the door into a hail of automatic weapons fire.

Reaper felt the heavy munitions thud into his chest, spider-webbing cracks into the thick carbon plates covering his torso. His eyes rolled behind his mask and he turned to a wraith, wisps of smoke leaving his form as munitions flew through his form and thudded into the wall, knocking chunks out of the wall until the heavy calibre turrets had run their drums dry and clicked over into empty bandoliers. Reaper raised a shotgun in the CO's direction as his form resolidified, sending him out of his plate glass windows with his chest cavity exposed to the cold air and a look of raw fear on his emaciated face.

A moment later and his killer was in the courtyard, materialising in the shadow of a weapons locker to snap the neck of the Master Sergeant frantically pulling the physical lock off the door to the armoury, the veteran's essence hung in the air like a summer squall, and Reaper drank it in like a glutton as the entire population of the small base emptied into the courtyard. He made no moves as they advanced, carefully and cautious. These were trained military men, but as they advanced into striking range several things happened at once.

A punch was thrown, Reaper blocked, braced his knees, flipped the man over his shoulder, and broke his skull open on the floor. There was the clatter of multiple weapons being brought to ready as he was surrounded; and Reaper consumed the essence of the dead man’s soul. Then he drew his guns.

The explosion of power that erupted from him was beyond monstrous. Shot flew everywhere, burning with the heat of consumed souls and Reaper’s sheer hatred. Flesh was run to ruin by a shower of burning white-hot lead. Armour cracked and buckled, shattering and giving way to paper-thin fatigues and weak fragile skin. Even the few bullets that found reyes in the midst of his self-induced firestorm had no effect, the damage healing as quickly as it arrived. When he was done, Reyes tossed his guns, reached inside his coat, and pulled new ones from the aether.

He left the courtyard a broken mess, shattered stone and empty, drained corpses painted with blood, viscera, and fragments of bone. But there were still two more items on his checklist. First was the vehicle hub, he painted the walls with the engineers and reduced the heavily armoured vehicles to molten slag. The second was the Bunker-Lab.

This facility had been built on bedrock, and the paramilitary organisations science and R&D department had claimed the innermost chambers for themselves, a dense network of shadowy tunnels run through the land like a rat’s warren. Reaper flowed through the halls, silently making work of every scientist and technician oblivious to the carnage that had taken place earlier. He revelled in the panic, the screams and frantic shouts as he picked colleagues apart and shredded the metal doors they hid behind, he was even impressed, the main chamber housed a prototype anti-tank gauss weapon, and he’d been so surprised they managed to lure him in that he let them hit him with it.

A three-ton, mach two point five slug had impacted Gabriel Reyes in the face, the damage was so severe that his head and torso disintegrated, turning into a fine red and white powder, the friction of the impact generated so much heat that the falling stumps of his arms and legs were cauterised and set aflame, and the decrepit, permanently decaying flesh that comprised his body burned like paper. The scientists cheered, until every shadow in the room gathered essence and the Reaper reformed for darkness and the ashes of his former body. Then they screamed.

Gabriel Reyes walked out of the complex leaving it a broken ruin. Walls and floors and even ceilings covered in a mess of vital fluids, fragments of bone, and shredded body-parts worthy of a horror film. Not dissimilar to the mess he and Morrison had left the God-mind core years earlier, a scowl crossed his face under his mask, and he tore a nearby stone statuette at the gate apart in anger. When his Talon extraction team arrived, they found him waiting amid a veritable mountain of stone-dust and still covered in blood. The pilot shook her head, quietly locked the cockpit, and set off back home, nope, she was not touching that with a ten foot barge-pole that was held by somebody else.


End file.
